Thursday, January 17, 2019

Some clueless people ask what's wrong with the Gillette ad. I wasn't particularly insulted by this ad – which is approaching 20 million views and 1 million downvotes – because similar stuff has become a part of our everyday lives.

But let me calmly answer the question as if it were a serious one and explain why I consider creators and apologists of the 108-second-long video (TRF) to be bad human beings who need to be treated as such.

There are hundreds of deceptions, lies, manipulations, demagogic statements, mispresentations of facts, and malicious attacks against particular men, all white men, all men, and against innocent examples of masculine behavior, not to mention lots of manifestations of prejudices. Out of these hundreds, I chose twenty-five.

0:00-0:05 – Buzzwords without full sentences are deceptively mixed

We hear noise from the media that talks about "bullying", "the MeToo movement", and "masculinity". In some cases, these words don't form full sentences. They have nothing to do with shaving or with a sensible discussion. And a healthy man turns off the radio or TV or switches to another channel or radio station when the quality of the content drops this low.

What is worse is that these completely different buzzwords are being mixed in order for the viewer to think that they are associated with each other if not equivalent. They are not equivalent at all and a fair person shouldn't automatically associate them.

0:00-0:05 – MeToo wasn't created by masculinity at all

The MeToo mania is a decadent movement encouraging women to invent false accusations against men – and pushing everyone to take them seriously, thus suppressing the presumption of innocence. Everyone who hasn't spent the recent years in a cave knows that most of the important faces of the movement have been proven to be shameless liars. Some of the notorious examples are reviewed in a parody of the Gillette ad, The Best WOMEN Can Be.

While the interest in women is driven by some male hormones, the MeToo movement isn't a result of masculinity. It's a product of women's fantasies, radical feminism, and some people's inclination to lie whenever it seems safe and beneficial for them. The mixing of the MeToo movement and masculinity is deceptive because they have almost nothing to do with each other.

0:00-0:05 – Bullying isn't a masculine activity

The mixing of the words is also designed to make the viewers associate masculinity with bullying. While men have twice as strong upper body muscles as women in average, they don't have stronger psychological inclinations to bullying and they don't want to be more cruel.

In recent years, female bullying has been investigated closely. Experts agree that female bullies can sometimes be even worse than male bullies. The page and many papers explains that female bullies do all kinds of things including physical bullying, stealing, damaging personal property, and character assassinations – teenage girls are undoubtedly more malicious in spreading harmful untrue rumors than teenage boys. It is not quite a coincidence that Penny (from The Big Bang Theory) used to be a bully at the high school while Leonard, Sheldon, and Howard were the victims.

The association between masculinity and bullying is scientifically indefensible if we compare the amount of intentions. When the acts of bullying are weighted by the physical strength in some ways, boys win but it's not their fault.

Note that the buzzword that appears at the beginning is "masculinity", not "toxic masculinity". The claim by some people that this ad "only" attacks toxic masculinity is a plain lie.

0:00-0:05 – Only white men are chosen as the target

The creators of this ad only attack masculinity – defenders say "toxic masculinity" – but in reality, almost all the "bad guys" are white men and almost all the "good guys" are the black men. In the politically correct jargon, the ad is therefore both sexist and racist. The producers haven't created any video about the toxic femininity or (which would be very important) toxic feminism, toxic homosexuality (or especially toxic homosexualism), toxic n*ggerness, or – more obviously, something that is really needed – toxic Islam, among other things. If a TV ad attacked those, the Left would be hysterical.

It's only the white men that can be attacked in this way, much like the Jews were the main "officially permitted" targets in Nazi Germany. This unequal treatment of groups of people is wrong.

0:10-0:20 – No evidence that the running boys are doing anything wrong

In this segment, like in the whole ad, it's being implicitly claimed that a vast majority of the boys and men are doing something wrong. But this thesis contradicts the real world data – most men are neither bullies nor rapists etc. – as well as the "data" in the artificial situation depicted by the ad.

We see a group of boys running through a room while another boy is being hugged by his mother. Clouds suggest that some of the boys think that he is a sissy and a loser. It is not clear which boy or how many boys think so; and more importantly, it is not clear whether this view is unjustified. The visual data surely make it plausible that the hugged boy is a sissy – and other things – and at some level, it's impossible for others not to notice, and beyond another threshold, it's wrong to hide it.

It's likely that most of the boys are being demonized just for running through the room. Thankfully, both boys and girls are still sometimes running through rooms and outside, too. And it seems likely that the boy should be encouraged to live in the real world and look for more manly and independent ways to deal with the difficulties. Instead, the ad says that the majority of boys should suppress their normal playful behavior or even to overlook things that are obvious to them.

We see a cartoon at 0:18 that depicts animated male heads attracted to a female. A white guy is shown as being playful with a black lady in the kitchen and her buttocks. It could be his wife. Even if she weren't, she could find it pleasant or it could have been an agreed part of her job contract. It's not justified to automatically denounce this merry guy.

Around 0:22, both young men and women are showing some gestures indicating their interest in sexual activities. The video is incompatible with the anti-male narration suggesting that the "wrongdoings of masculinity have been going for far too long". No clear wrongdoings have been shown. Men are clearly being demonized for their being men – and for their being attracted to females. Both things were assigned to them when they were born, they can't change it, the world has lived just fine with those things, and it's therefore utterly wrong to criticize the men for that.

On top of that, women may be sexually excited, too, so even if it were legitimate to attack men for their being sexually attracted to women (or somebody), it's unfair because women are often attracted, too – and they show this attraction by somewhat different symptoms. And we shouldn't forget that the scenes shown in this segment are artificial scenes created to entertain the viewers. So even if they were wrong in the real life, they don't quite depict the real life.

Demonization of such arts – or the proposed bans of such shows and cartoons – would push the Western policies very close to the censorship as known in the Islamic world or China.

0:23-0:24 – Manspreading at home is totally OK

Three boys are watching TV at this point. The median male viewer needs one hour of research to figure out what they could possibly claim to be imperfect about these three boys watching TV. I think that I have discovered the incredible answer. It's called manspreading: sitting with legs wide apart.

Why would someone claim it is wrong? Because one occupies extra space in the public transportation. However, these boys clearly have enough space. The boy in the middle could be a victim – having less room than the left guy who is manspreading. But the boy in the middle controls the TV remote which is a compensating advantage which also suggests that if he were feeling uncomfortable, he could ask the other boy to stop manspreading.

0:23-0:24 – Men who are manspreading have a good health reason

Here I need to reveal some secrets to the TRF readers who are female feminists. My lesson could help them to score some points in biology if they become contestants in "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader". The first secret is that men have testicles, two balls in between the legs. The second secret is that the balls are located in a special bag known as scrotum. The purpose of the bag is to reduce the temperature because the optimum temperature for the work done in the balls – the production of sperm (which needs to combine with an egg if Nature wants to produce an embryo) – is lower than the temperature inside the human body.

Without manspreading, the testicles are more likely to be squeezed; or more likely to be overheated. That's why manspreading may be a matter of comfort if not health. It is not true, as the ad indicates, that men are manspreading purely because they are jerks.

0:23-0:24 – Woman actually like manspreading men

The ad suggests that men who are manspreading are making the life worse for others, especially for women. But science says something different. The men who are manspreading make the life better for women because women find manspreading men more attractive. You will have to read the article if you want to know whether it's because women assume that such men have more powerful organs.

0:23-0:24 – Manspreading men are victims, not criminals

The commercial implicitly claims that men who are manspreading are almost committing some terrible offense if not a criminal act. In reality, they are the typical victims because Anna Dovgalyuk, 20, pours bleach and water on men's crotches whenever they are in St Petersburg. (Although there are some rumors that the viral video is a propaganda created by the Kremlin.)

As you can see, I wrote four paragraphs of text to deal with the deception and nasty behavior that the social justice warrior compress into one seemingly inactive second of an advert. That's quite typical: social justice warriors are behaving as insufferable mess in almost every millisecond of their lives.

0:25-0:26 – The man is just showing what an Alligator does

There is absolutely nothing wrong about the man's behavior in that second. He hasn't even touched her buttocks. As far as I can see, he just pretended to be the current Czech president Miloš Zeman. In 2013, before he was first elected, he used a gesture to explain to a female journalist what an alligator does to babes, so that she could understand at least something about his dumbphone with a big button, the Alligator.

Is Zeman's reference to the Alligator also politically incorrect? Thankfully, it's funny but OK in my country. Zeman was clearly in a better physical shape five or six years ago.

0:25-0:50 – Laughing people are better than sourballs

In the early scenes around 0:25, people are laughing, happy, and they have a good time. Around 0:45, they change to sourballs or gloomy victims who are terrified by the political correctness around them and we're told that something has changed. I am sorry but people naturally want to be happy and they prefer the society with some entertainment from 0:25 over the society of sourballs around 0:45.

"Who's the daddy..." and some other microscenes were too fast and uninteresting to me. They just randomly address some dialogues or gestures related to romantic or sexual relationships but I honestly don't know what was the "sin" they wanted the viewers to see.

0:29-0:32 – The manager was excessively polite to the female co-worker

In these three seconds, we see some corporate managers at a meeting. The only female participant apparently said something that the men consider stupid. I can't know for certain it was stupid because I wasn't shown the context. But statistics is such that it's much more likely than not that her monologue was stupid.

The boss says "What she actually wanted to say" to partly defend her. Without his intervention, her proposal would probably be treated harshly so he felt the need to defend her. But he actually pretended that she was saying something intelligent – which is too much politeness.

0:29-0:32 – The polite approach of the top manager wasn't polite enough

Nevertheless, the creators of the ad clearly wanted to convey the message that even this amount of politeness wasn't enough! Are you serious? What is the more polite way to deal with someone's assertion that looks silly than to say "what I think she actually wanted to say..."?

Clearly, the commercial effectively says that it's always wrong to "mansplain" – it's wrong for a man to disagree with a woman in any context. And such a ban on "mansplaining" would be lethal for the society because indeed, in some occupations, women are often saying much less reasonable things than men, in business and elsewhere. "Mansplaining" is just a special weird word for "explaining" used when the "explainer" is male and the "explainee" is female – and there is clearly nothing universally wrong about "mansplaining" just like there is nothing universally wrong about "womansplaining", "blacksplaining", "whitesplaining", or "feynmansplaining".

People who want to demonize "mansplaining" in general are dangerous loons.

0:32-0:34 – Boys are wrestling and it helps to shape who they are

There is nothing wrong about the boys who are wrestling. In the animal kingdom, youngs are playing in similar ways. Little girls sometimes do the same thing. If they don't harm each other and if the physical dominance of one kid isn't being repeatedly abused, there is no reason to worry. This belongs to the childhood.

Each of us has continuously grown from the childhood years. But have you ever realized how much stronger you have become? Or how weak you were as a kid? And how weak other kids are? Just look at the little boys' hands. Their strength is clearly much lower than yours. It is no coincidence that we don't often hear about boys who killed or seriously injured each other while wrestling.

One boy has apparently won and kept the other boy, the redhead, in the grass. The redhead wanted to liberate himself but didn't have enough muscles for that. That means one boy won and the redhead lost. Next time, the redhead may try to win. Or he may better run away if it is easier. Or ask the stronger boy – or his parents – to stop it. There are many solutions, checks, and balances that guarantee that this doesn't evolve to anything pathological in most cases. To prevent boys from playing just because it could turn to something bad is the real pathology!

0:33-0:37 – "Boys will be boys" is a tautology

The commercial even seems to attack men who say that "boys will be boys". But whether or not it is attacked as an "old excuse", this sentence is tautologically true which means that everyone who has a problem with this sentence is demonstrably a liar. "Boys will be boys" isn't a vacuous tautology, however. In this case, the sentence shows that at least some boys at least sometimes want to play, show their muscles, and try to achieve the dominance.

These traits are indeed correlated with masculinity but there's nothing generally pathological about them. Instead, these are indeed traits that manifest themselves when boys or men become heroes, too. Piers Morgan has mentioned a heroic act by a British soldier in Kenya. Is that manifestation of masculinity also "pathological"? It's not and everyone who fails to appreciate the soldier is immoral.

I didn't understand whether the ad also tried to attack the men making their hamburgers at a barbecue – or what they do with their arms to look relaxed and self-confident – so I can't discuss it. But I suppose that the commercial wanted to demonize them as well. I couldn't understand why.

0:37-0:39 – No, nothing finally changed

Right after "boys will be boys" comes under attack, we are told that "something finally changed". Although the narration isn't organized or comprehensible, it's rather clear that the second sentence is said to assert that "boys will not be boys". I am sorry but "boys will not be boys" will always be false and the claim by the commercial is just another lie.

More importantly, because "MeToo" is mentioned in the first seconds, "something finally changed" is rather clearly referring to the MeToo mania as the revolutionary process responsible for that "change". But that's nonsense. MeToo has been just a short-lived hysteria by irrelevant hysterical lying women. When it comes to the real sexual offenses, their frequency or the fraction that is properly investigated hasn't changed and their legal or criminal status (or status as offenses) hasn't changed, either.

The first talking head who babbles something about the sexual harassment is Ana Kasparian from the far left "Young Turks" YouTube propaganda channel. I think that it's just wrong to show such obnoxious people on regular TV channels that may be watched by children. She has said too many terrible things that are way too hostile and the demonstrably overgeneralize – e.g. about the Trump voters.

OK, we're told that there will be no "going back" as if MeToo has made an irreversible revolutionary change to the society but as I said, it is nonsense.

0:50-0:55 – Men already do hold other men accountable

President Camacho from Idiocracy is quoted as saying that men must hold other men accountable. In the proper context, the sentence was just saying that someone like Harvey Weinstein shouldn't circumvent the law. But structures have existed for centuries or millenniums in the U.S. and other countries that are designed for appropriate men to hold other men accountable.

The quote means nothing outside the context in which Terry Crews said it and there has been no change of the legal system that is designed to make sure that men (including cops, judges, inspectors, journalists...) hold other men accountable, at least most of the time. In this system where men are held accountable, "men" refers to people of both sexes – because the system is designed to keep both men and women accountable!

The commercial demagogically distorted the meaning of such sentences to indicate that the law should selectively target male individuals as if they were evil but such an interpretation of accountability is unconstitutional.

0:58-1:01 – Swimming suits are hard to decipher

There was some tension between some men near the swimming pool. Someone probably used a camcorder to record a scene with a girl's swimming suit. A man didn't like it – it is not clear whether the focus of the attention liked it.

Both male and female cameramen sometimes record such scenes, especially because those could be used in commercial ways. In particular, porn is a $100 billion industry. If feminists don't root for women to be employed as cameramen, they should because porn is arguably more profitable than STEM. So there should be nothing masculine about this scene.

1:01-1:04 – Black guy was more likely to be dangerous than the white guy

In this segment, a white guy likes a girl on the street. He could have asked her for her phone number or invite her to a restaurant or something. There is nothing unacceptable about it. This is how many people get to know each other. She might have liked him, too. Or she could have said "no, please go away".

A black guy rather rudely stopped the white guy with his hands and says "not cool" if I understand that accent well. Well, I don't think you should be touching strangers on the street. It seems like a more problematic act than to try to ask for someone's telephone number.

On top of that, although the commercial wants everyone to assume otherwise, it's more likely that the black guy has stopped the white guy because the black guy had his own plans with the young woman.

Both men were sort of involved with her, in one way or another. Statistics says that the number of rapes per male U.S. citizen is about twice as high for black U.S. men then for white U.S. men. The gap isn't too high because the average U.S. black is just half-black. In less mixed societies, the ratios are much more extreme. Most of the rapes in Sweden are being made by men born outside Europe – although they're still a small fraction of the population of Sweden.

Like in the rest of the video, the viewer is supposed to believe that the white men are the rapists while the black guys are the good guys. But the cold hard data say something completely different. The commercial spreads prejudices that misrepresent the cold hard facts.

1:06-1:08 – "Some" indicates that most men are criminals or jerks

In their demands for men to become "better" – which means "worse" in numerous cases, as discussed above – we are being told that "some already are [better]". The word "some" almost certainly implies that only a minority is already OK. It follows from the text that the creators of the commercial think that most men are either bullies, rapists, sexual attackers, or jerks of some kind.

Is it true? It depends on the definition of a "sexual attack" or a "jerk", among other things. But if someone thinks that the normal behavior of most men is almost criminal and has to be almost eradicated, then she wants to liquidate most of the human civilization because most of the aspects of the majority's masculinity are totally fine and mostly needed for the survival of the civilization and the mankind itself.

I can make a similar point a bit differently: Because the creator of the video says that only a minority of men are fine, it undoubtedly proves that she suffers from misandry. If someone has a serious problem with a majority of men, how it could not be a textbook example of misandry?

1:05-1:20 – It's wrong to stop all these normal interactions

In this segment, the "good men" – which are overwhelmingly black – are stopping the "wrongdoing". Some of it looks like real wrongdoing, something – like the two boys' wrestling – doesn't. It seems rather clear to me that even in the mixed package we are being shown, the cure is worse than the disease. In combination, the "good men" seem to create a new unfree society where almost everything is forbidden.

1:14-1:16 – The black girl isn't strong and shouldn't be deceived

A black man, let us assume it is her father, is teaching a little girl to say "I am strong". I don't really think it's helpful. The girl is not strong. If she angers a stronger boy by her "I am strong", she can also be beaten. You may say that the beating would also be wrong but it is a natural result of certain circumstances – a law of Nature.

At any rate, if she were beaten after incorrectly believing that she was strong, or after she angered somebody by her "I am strong", the dad would be partly responsible for that.

It is wrong to teach the kids to lie. It is wrong to teach them to deny the reality. It is wrong to needlessly lie to the children. Girls are weaker than the boys and they naturally master different tools than the brute force to happily live in the environment and to push other people in desired directions. The girl can be taught and encouraged to do such things but the simple "I am strong" is useless or counterproductive.

Clearly, this is not just about some black dad's strategy. Telling girls that they are strong in ways in which they are clearly not too strong is a big part of the feminist and affirmative action movement. And it is counterproductive in most cases. You can't build a better world on lies. Self-confidence isn't some magic sauce that makes everyone do miracles. In average, the ideal amount of self-confidence is the amount that realistically reflects the reality! Too little self-confidence may harm the people but so can too much self-confidence.

1:21-1:22 – "Some" is sometimes more than enough

The narrator says that "some [men who have already changed] is not enough". But given the fact that the video promotes hiding from the other boys, complete ban on the boys' wrestling, ban on manspreading in your friend's living room, ban on the top male manager's disagreement with a female colleague, and lots of other things, I find it obvious that the number of men who have "already changed" is already way too high.

Masculinity or toxic masculinity isn't an important problem in our world. The shortage of masculinity and the disappearing masculinity is an actual huge problem! Sadly, the undesirable social trends are combined with a biological interpretation of the downtrend, e.g. in the average amount and quality of semen (unless it's a superstition).

Let's hope that most of the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow – and not e.g. trans-women of tomorrow. I am actually optimistic and I believe that the generation of boys who are 10 years old today will be men who understand many things, including the fact that contemporary feminism is incoherent hogwash. I have numerous reasons to think that the kids will be different than the generation born around 2000 i.e. a decade earlier.

See these two tweets for an optimistic example of the common sense of boys who are 10-13 today.